Sequential art – comics – has always pushed boundaries in story-telling and while not unique, Image’s One-shot release of Hedra by Jesse Lonergan (Joe and Azat, All Star) isn’t something that I’ve come across before: a science fiction comic book without dialogue or narration. Nothing but the artwork.
In a glorious exploration of the comics medium with echoes of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Flash Gordon, Chris Ware, and Moebius, a lone astronaut leaves a world ravaged by nuclear war in search of life. What she finds is beyond all explanation.
The cover of Lonergan’s book shows the way. A grid of loosely drawn blue squares is punctuated by a glimpse of a planet and the launch of a distinctly retro rocketship – because that’s what it is, not a spaceship but a rocketship. Once into the book, the pattern repeats, but is that a missile and not a rocket? A mushroom cloud suggests the former. Rockets are flying all over the page, their trails drawn with geometric precision in the blue squares. Mushroom clouds inhabit larger panels. Glimpses of a destroyed city. A farmer. A skeleton.
In a destroyed Capitol building, a decision is made and a rocketship is designed. A lottery choses the pilot. Blast off. All this without any words. The journey through space is depicted via a series of geometric shapes with the rocketship. Our protagonist lands on a series of planets, collecting samples of plants. And then, something is seen outside of the ship. Now for the title page. Indeed! Up to now, Lonergan’s art has been almost exclusively shades of red on blue, with arcs of white. Now, there’s a yellow planet. A settlement. Unseen danger. A hint of Gulliver’s Travels. A smidge of Journey to the Centre of the Earth. Another nod to Flash Gordon. Perhaps a shout out to The Iron Man. I suspect Lonergan has also read Abbott’s Flatland. The story concludes with a rescue, a visit to a geometric planet and a return to Earth, sans rocketship.
‘Hedra’ could be anything in this story – the protagonist, the rocketship, the friend found, the nature of the conclusion or one of the planets visited. As a polyhedra is the singular of a 3D shape, or polyhedron, I’m inclined to believe it is the planet visited towards the end that allows the protagonist to return home. This is the only exception to the clarity of the story-telling. At no point in the book do you get lost or wonder what Lonergan is trying to say.
The art is like nothing I’ve seen in a comic book for the most part. The retro feel is perfectly realised; Lonergan must be a fan of this stuff. Only when on planets’ surfaces is there any detail to the panels; which are either red for the destroyed Earth, yellows and beiges for where the adventure takes place or blue on the planet of geometry.. And of course, the ubiquitous blue square panels bisected with white arcs when we’re in space.
In the end, it is a fairly routine tale of the apocalypse and humanity’s folly. It is also about friendship and perhaps the fear of the different. But I’ve not seen a story told like this before. It is utterly engaging and a visual delight. Clever, without being pretentious. A simple and well thought out homage to a simpler time of science fiction and a delight to read.
Title: Hedra
Publisher: Image
Rating: 4/5
Reviewer: Ian J Simpson
